Limbo | ||||||
Bernard Wolfe | ||||||
Westholme Publishing, 438 pages | ||||||
A review by Matthew Hughes
Just as foreign, of course, is the future. I once wrote an entire speech (for someone else, that being then my
profession), riffing off the thought that the past is the old country we all come from while the future is that
strange new land to which we are all emigrating, where we will work at new jobs, speak a different language,
adopt new values.
Hartley's quote bubbled up from the basement as I reread Bernard Wolfe's 1952 post-nuclear war dystopia, Limbo. My
first reading was back around 1965, when I was the kind of teenager who vacuumed up big fat sf novels found in
second-hand bookshops. Coming at it in 2012, Limbo offers a double treat -- or threat? -- in terms of visiting
foreign lands where they do things differently. It's a vision of 1990 (then Wolfe's future, now our past) deeply
based upon the preoccupations of 1950.
That's no great insight on my part. Wolfe, himself, spells it out in the afterword: This book, then, is a rather
bilious rib on 1950 -- on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone
on being 1950 for four more decades.
I think, with that remark, he undersells himself and his book. In Limbo there are some now-familiar sf
tropes -- cyborgs, Skynet military computers playing war against each other with WMDs, post-holocaust societies
fixated on strange new philosophies -- that were just coming out of the egg when he was writing. If he didn't
invent them, he was one of the earliest extrapolators, and did a quite respectable job.
But what I found fascinating was precisely that foreign country of 1950 that so infused the story and filled
the characters. This is not pulp science fiction of the fifties. John W. Campbell would have thrown the
manuscript across the room. Instead, it is a serious literary novel of the proto-beatnik era, taking a
thorough (perhaps, at times, far too thorough) examination of the issues of its day.
So we get a great deal of Freudian analysis. We get meditations on momism (if you don't know what momism
was, cf. Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers). We get an awful lot of prefrontal lobotomy, which was then
the hot new technique for treating mental illness. And we get an unholy amount of musing on sex, especially on
frigidity among women (a major post-Kinsey concern) with reference to the clitoroid versus vaginal personality types.
And all of this comes at you with unstoppable energy and verve. I can imagine Wolfe as the kind of guy you knew
in college who could get you to stay up all night drinking the wine of paradise and freewheeling through philosophy,
history, psychology, mythology and half a dozen other ologies, pushing each other into sudden insights and minor
epiphanies that would have you saying "Oh, wow, man!" In the morning you might not remember exactly what it
was that had so bent your mind at three a.m., but you'd have no doubt it had been totally cool at the time.
And, of course, he likes his puns. Here's one on the Russian style of governance: "The bear never reigns
but it paws." Some people hate that sort of thing. Some people love it. If you're of the latter enthusiasm,
here's a book you may want to read. If you're of the former ilk, you'll want to hide behind the couch
until Wolfe goes away.
Always of interest, too, when reading old-timey prognostications, is to note some of the things the author
completely missed. Like the sexual revolution. The civil rights revolution in the US. Credit cards and the
whole credit economy. The internet. But, fair play, Wolfe was writing about a 1950 that went on for forty more years.
Did I mention the story? In the middle of an atomic war (pre-ICBMs) waged by fleets of bombers directed by a
Soviet and a Western EMSIAC (Electronic Military Strategic Integrator and Computer), Dr. Martine, a neurosurgeon
in an airborne MASH plane, has had enough of the murderous madness. He steals an aircraft and, defying the
computer, flies to a south Pacific island where he holes up for eighteen years, performing lobotomies on the
locals, who have a tradition of skull-boring each other to control aggression.
But eventually the world catches up with the doctor. The island is visited by an world-touring Olympic team
of Immob athletes. Immob is the post-war pacifism craze: young men have their limbs removed and replaced
with cybernetic prostheses, based on the idea that you can't make war if you've got no arms and legs. Yes,
it's a silly idea, even within the ambit of the book: it turns out that Immob makes arms that shoot bullets and napalm.
But this is satire, not realism. And the biggest irony of all is that the whole Immob movement is based
upon a private journal that Martine left in the MASH plane before he took off for the tropics. It was found by
a colleague he never cared for -- Halder, who snored in the bunk above him -- and taken as a bible for the
post-war world. Half of which Halder rules, in Martine's name.
Now Martine, the unknown prophet traveling under a false name, goes back to the world he ran away from, or at
least to the Inland Strip, the part of North America still inhabitable. And there he sees what his private
maunderings look like when they're grossly mistranslated into reality. It's a reminder that irony is by no
means a modern invention.
Limbo has been called one of the one hundred best science fiction novels. It's also been called, by
Anthony Boucher no less, "a pretentious hodgepodge."
I say, it's a trip to the past by way of a future that never was.
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